


Likeness

by eremiticBacchant (orphan_account)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Homestuck Kink Meme, Other, Queer Themes, Trans Character, Transgender
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-16
Updated: 2012-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 16:31:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/eremiticBacchant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the kink meme, "Curious about their eerie similarity to their ecto-twin, one of the kids begins to experiment with crossdressing." More accurately: Dave slowly comes to terms with a fluid gender identity while dressing femme in secret. Cue John bursting in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Mirror

>John: Scar Dave for life

What? No, you’re walking down to one of the rooms with all of the neat captchalogue machines and their upgrades on the asteroid you’re staying on for the next two and a half years. You’d never do something like that to Dave, he’s your best friend! And, to be honest, even though you truly do not identify as homosexual…sometimes you allow yourself to think that maybe trying it with Dave could warrant an exception. If that were a thing. And he brought it up. And maybe your judgment was severely impaired at the time. Or something. It’s pretty embarrassing to think about—and you usually don’t! Your mind wanders as you recall the exiles and how you found out from WV? that those confusing and irrelevant thoughts you used to get sometimes were actually caused by trumped up live chess pieces typing bizarre commands into game terminals. You wish you could blame your thoughts about Dave on a ship-happy exile, but you know these feelings and rambling thoughts are your own.

You arrive at the captchalogue machine room in question. There are several throughout the weird laboratory on this asteroid, but you know for sure this one will be empty. It’s in the part of the structure that used to belong to one of the trolls who died recently. Sollux, you think. Even though you’re told that his ghost still exists and went off with Aradia to haunt dream-bubbles before you and Jade managed to make it here, none of you like infringing on the space that used to belong to deceased members of the troll group. You also know that Karkat took his death hard and either purely out of respect for the dead or to avoid another one of Karkat’s meltdowns, this part of their collective home was the most abandoned. Normally you’d borrow the machines in some other troll’s psuedohive, but Jade was insistent. This favor for her required secrecy! Or at least inconspicuousness, according to her.

Weirdly, the door is locked. You pause for a minute and listen but you still don’t hear any hint of movement from inside. The last person in must have locked it on their way out. And hey, that gives you the perfect chance to test out the versatility of these wind powers. You take a steadying breath and lift a hand. This is a trick you’ve been waiting try since you achieved god-tier. You can only imagine how much your prankster’s gambit would rise if you could get your windy thing to push the tumblers of a lock into position! You were never much good at escaping or unlocking anything besides trick handcuffs, but you’re sure you can pull this off with just….a little…concentration.

A small twist of wind curls around your fingers and you direct it with near surgical precision. The internal mechanism slides into place without so much as a click. Awesome! Steady hands and decent spatial perception of the mechanism were all it took, and now you should be able to reap the reward! Right? No? Dang, what does it take to climb another tier around here? There are only so many universes to be saved. You’re positive that totally sweet trick would’ve shot you up the old echeladder, like, ten rungs at least. But spirits not in the least dampened—it’s still a totally cool skill all by itself—you bound into the empty room.

Er, not so empty. Sitting in front of a vanity, beside a pile of freshly alchemized clothing and a ludicrously diverse array of mirrors, some of them even cracked and distorted, you recognize the back of the blond, smartly coiffed figure of Rose. She seems to have been applying mascara as you cheerfully burst in on what you guess was her alone time. Whoops.

“Woah! Hey Rose! Sorry to, uh, break in, I guess. It didn’t sound like anyone was in here so I just. Yeah, anyway, I just need to use the Alchemiter really quick--” You scan the room quickly, immediately spotting the device in question as you spew out the words with your typical enthusiasm, not really stopping to hear a response. Although normally you think she would’ve interrupted by now with a sarcastic quip. Is she feeling alright? “You don’t mind, do you? I’ll be out in a second.”

You’ve already crossed far into the room and are standing at the Alchemiter, your back to her. There are mirrors everywhere, more than you even guessed at first glance, some littered across and broken on the floor. Seriously, what is up with that? Rose had never seemed so preoccupied with appearance before, nor so careless. She still hasn’t said anything. She’s been facing the wall perpendicular to the door with her mirrors and stuff without moving this whole time.

“Uh, Rose?” You think you hear a strangled sound from her. This is not her usual MO at all. Maybe you should’ve asked permission to come in first? But it’s not even her room, you think defensively. Granted, it was probably kind of stupid to just go ahead and do your windy thing on the lock without knocking, but you were excited to try it out and forgot, really.

You try to think of something more to say, suddenly uneasy, while you wait for some kind of response. You step onto the large circular base of the Alchemiter where there’s one last full length mirror obstructing the way of new items. You really just want to get this favor over with and abscond now. You don’t know how to resolve awkward situations half as easily as you know how to blunder into them, apparently. It’s a pitfall you think most internet friends must have when meeting up in person.

You heave up the mirror, looking into it as you do. Over your shoulder you see her sitting, still unmoved from her original position. You haven’t been this confused since that one time she’d gone grimdark. The kind of stillness she’s affecting now isn’t typical of her, really, and neither is that posture. Her shoulders are curved in and tense-looking. Your gaze travels across her hunched frame and lands on the mirror in front of her, but instead of the lavender you expect, your wide blue eyes meet bright candy red.

“Oh my God. Dave.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As opposed to going for a more straightforward crossdressing-as-a-kink fic, I decided to delve a little further and try a genderqueer!Dave exploration of sexuality and gender fluidity thing.
> 
> Also I may as well make a note that Dave keeps his name and male pronouns throughout.


	2. Behind the Shield

> John: Be the coolkid, months in the past, but not many.

You are Dave Strider, sicknasty composer, ironic protégé, and all around coolkid. You like girls, but not really in the way you think you should. You kind of want to be them, actually, and can’t admit it. Sometimes you hate yourself for not having the courage to be open about it—that is, your fluid sense of gender. Sometimes you just hate yourself for being this way in the first place.

Internalized self-hatred isn’t very cool. Neither is being unable to own the parts of yourself that are difficult or unconventional, but you’re still an object to both. You think Bro wouldn’t have struggled so hard with something like this. But you guess that doesn’t matter anyway. You don’t want to think about it. He’s dead now.

You can’t remember when it started. When you could begin acknowledge to yourself that your admiration and attraction weren’t actually for girls, but for how they looked, what they wore, and the ideal of beauty they represented. It consumed you in ways you didn’t want to face. Hadn’t wanted to face. It must have been way early on, though, because you don’t need to Rose’s pseudo-psychoanalysis to tell you that your total rejection of this was manifested in an almost obsessive need to be exactly like your Bro. You could never allow yourself to give a hint of the ambivalence you had towards your assigned gender, or the trappings of femininity you coveted so hard. So you did everything you possibly could to be this fucking flawless little copy. It wasn’t for his benefit--after years of it, you don’t know any other way to be. “Bro’s little brother” _is_ your identity. It’s a shield for this despised weakness as much as your shades are a shield for your stupid mutant-eyes.

Some stuff isn’t just part of trying to be him, though. You legitimately like mixing beats, and have a talent and love for rapping and sword fighting. But dressing like him? Copying his speech patterns, adapting his sense of humor, his way of dressing? It’s pretty much pathological. Not the puppets, though. You hate those impudent little fuckers.

It’s the small differences that give you hope that this isn’t too completely batshit of you. It helps you believe that somewhere inside you’re still capable of being yourself without having to copy anybody.

But then you had that dream. It was when the game began and you took over as Rose’s server player. At the time, you didn’t think too much on the similarities between you and her. Your pathetic and not at all ironic desires were long suppressed. Which was probably why they surfaced in your dreams of the non-Dersite variety. You dreamt you sat at a vanity, brushing and brushing blonde hair that was just long enough to tickle your nape. When you looked in the mirror to adjust your headband, Rose’s eyes that stared back at you from your own square-jawed face.

Later, John would tell you about his ectobiology accident, and how you and your respective guardians had all been created as paradox clones. You and Rose were the products of an unholy mix of Bro and old Ms. Lalonde. John called it being ecto-twins. The memory of the dream you had flashed into the front of your mind again. Turning into your sibling, what the fuck else was new?

When Rose first fell asleep and went to Derse you argued with yourself for hours about how much of a horrorterrible idea it would be to captchalogue her clothing for later u—to keep. And look at sometimes maybe. There is no way to make it sound any less creepy than it actually had been.

It made you feel dirty. Guilty. You wanted it anyway.

You were jealous of her and hated yourself for it. In a senseless fit of misplaced revenge, you used John to reproduce her wizard fanfiction diaries. You didn’t want to be jealous anymore, but you were, and that’s why you convinced yourself to go through with it, to try and find proof among her personal things that maybe she was as messed up as you. Maybe if you had kept your cool as well as you kept up your poker face, you would have known better. It was a stupid idea.

But at least managing to captchalogue and alchemize some of her things without her noticing the first time gave you the courage to do it again. And again, and again.

Your real opportunity came when she left her house for good to fight imps and subvert the game or whatever the hell else she was doing. You didn’t dare use a computer with a screen visible to a server player or troll, but you managed. No one could ever know about this bizarre need, not even Jade, who would probably do a Strider proud with a complete lack of giving a shit about how weird you might be.

So while several versions of you were busy mastering time loops and wringing the in-game economy for every sweet, sweet boonbuck it had to give, your alpha self was sitting in your room using your iShades to control the things in Rose’s house and copy all of her shit. You even copied the frilly princess dresses you found buried in the back of her closet. Actually, especially those--you figured they could pass as ironically pretty. Her mom probably got them for her as a passive-aggressive thing.

Taking the stuff you knew she hated helped to make you feel like you were giving yourself that extra space that separated flat-out mimicking her style from maybe developing one of your own.

You put everything into a spare sylladex and put that sylladex into your own regularly equipped one. That way, if your main one ever ejected everything, Rose’s stuff (yours now) wouldn’t go everywhere and betray you, and you could carry it with you at all times, eliminating the chance that anyone would ever stumble onto it by accident.

> Dave: Speed up the narration

_Several weeks before the present time, but not many…_

Were you—were you just narrating your every action as you watched yourself obsessively in the mirror? Jesus, it was time to start hanging out with your friends more. For the past two weeks you’d been spending more and more time shut inside a room deep in Sollux’s old hive. Not many people went all the way out to the dead troll’s place, and it had a perfectly good alchemiter in a room you could lock.

At first you had tried to tell yourself you wouldn’t alchemize all the stuff you already had the captchalogue codes for. Then you tried to compensate by promising yourself you wouldn’t use adding and subtracting functions with the punch designix add-on to make new stuff. You predictably failed to resist the urge. Then you stalled for a while with just looking at the stuff you made and arranging it and rearranging it inside the alternate sylladex for two days. It had actually been easier to hold off on the thing you wanted most--wearing the clothes--because it was also tied up with your biggest fear, that someone would come in and catch you at it. But, slowly, you had begun to cave. You’d come this far already, and this was the best opportunity you could ever have hoped to have to just let go a little.

Still nervous and too stupidly shy to meet your own reflection in the vanity you alchemized from scratch, you had started messing with your hair first, combing it down with your fingers in the front to give you bangs and make it look longer your usual neatly side-parted style allowed. When you slipped on a plain red headband for the first time, your hands shook in a way that would have been imperceptible to anyone bar your brother, if he could have seen you then. The satin wrapped plastic clacked against your sunglasses and set them askew on your nose. You laid them aside; shields weren’t what you needed right then.

After a glance up, you had quickly realized that watching yourself in the mirror able to fit the reflection of almost your entire torso was way too weird. You didn’t want to look at your same old broken-record shirt with your brand new headband and sweet new hairstyle. You alchemized a hand mirror instead and stared at the way the red band complimented your eyes until your vision became too blurry with tears to see.

You were finally doing this. And it didn’t feel wrong at all.

After that, you stop holding back anymore. You may possibly have gone a little overboard with the mirrors, but you need plenty of extras anyway. As much as you love looking at yourself in beautiful femme clothes, you hate having to revert back to your everyday stuff when it's time to leave. A lot of mirrors get broken in anger and disgust.

Sometimes, on bad days, you destroy a couple even when you're trying your best to look—to look— _pretty_ , because you’ll look too hard at your arms, skinny but still muscled from strifing, or at the patchy stubble on your face, blonde but still _there_ , and the illusion you build for yourself in secret shatters and you just can’t take it anymore.

At least on those days, when you slink back into the main computer lab where everyone gathers regularly, they see your bloody knuckles and too-blank face and don't consider bothering you. They probably think you're mourning and have to be alone to protect the coolkid façade or some shit. You let them think that. It's safer that way.

> Dave: Return to present

It had taken you an unbelievably long time, but you finally did it—alchemized a balanced color palette of mascara and eye shadow and stuff, that is. What more can you expect? As if you have the balls to come out as…as whatever you are.

You're not sure you'd be able classify this even if you weren't afraid of your own introspection. All you can say for sure is that this isn’t about a fetish for you. It’s never been just like, spending your time in the empty hive fapping to how fucking gorgeous you look or something—well, okay, that was like one time, or three, tops; you’re Dave Goddamn Strider, how could you not?—most of the time you just do what you’re doing right now: sit messing around with your classy new wardrobe in front of your mirrors.

You lean in with the delicate mascara brush thingy and perfectly separate each eyelash. This is the third time you’re doing this in the past twenty minutes. Maybe it’s a little neurotic, but you don't feel the need to question yourself anymore, at least when you’re alone. This is your room, full of your awesome painstakingly alchemized crap, and you do what you want.

You're feeling pretty good for once and everything today has been going right, but then the door flies open with out so much as a warning click of the lock, banging off the wall once before slamming back closed. You nearly fucking lose an eye, but that doesn’t even matter because you are about to completely _lose your shit_.

It’s Egbert, just bounding in like this isn’t the most terrifying moment of your life and he—he just called you Rose. Did he just call you Rose. He just.

He did it again. He thinks you’re Rose. You let out a sound reminiscent of Terezi’s plush strangulation victims.

You have never gone from this level of heart-attack danger zone to delirious euphoria in your life, despite both of those emotions remaining firmly within the realm of “move one inch and your stomach will eject your alchemized cereal breakfast faster than a six year old with his first stack fetch modus can eject his two-card sylladex.”

You really don’t want John to realize his mistake. You carefully shut the tube of makeup and hunch your shoulders to hide your flat, flat chest from his view, but it doesn’t help when you track his progress across the room in the mirror to the Alchemiter and he lifts up that one mirror you were too lazy to drag over earlier, and his stupid, guileless blue eyes come into view and he’s looking into your eyes he’s looking into  
Your  
Red  
Motherfucking  
Demon eyes.

Eyes that are nothing like Rose’s—nothing like anyone’s, and he knows, he knows, _he knows—_

“Oh my God. Dave.”

John’s sudden recognition of you doesn’t seem to so much as stop to register in his mind before being rerouted on the fast track to being blurted out his dorky bucktoothed mouth. It does not pass Go, it does not collect two hundred dollars. But if John is given a Go Directly into Shock card, you just got a Directly Lose Your Cool and Do an Acrobatic Fucking Handspring off the Surface of this Metaphorical Board Completely card.

> Dave: Lose Your Cool and Do an Acrobatic Fucking Handspring off the Surface of this Metaphorical Board Completely

No. No, no, no, no, no.

Cool is _gone_. Cool just went and took a motherfucking Christmas vacation and left you home alone with stupid lock-picking Egderp bursting through the door like a rhetorical comedic duo of incompetent burglars. Except this bad movie metaphor was going off the rails. You aren’t going to save your ass and all the stuff in your precious room by way of some hilarious and hopefully painful slapstick hijinks. You are going to stay exactly where you are and ignore how your eyes are about to spill over right now from sheer pants-shitting terror of John’s reaction once his brain catches up to the rest of him.

You think you may have just been emotionally scarred for fucking life.


	3. On the Floor

> John: Go Directly into Shock

No…no, you’re okay. Probably. You can handle this. You _have to_ be able to handle this, despite your admitted inadequacy in the resolving-awkward-situations department, because it really doesn’t look like Dave is up to the task right now. If you didn’t know any better, you might even think he was about to cry.

Even so, you’re kind of afraid that any second now his expression will close up and you’ll be getting the beat down of your life for barging in on something so clearly private and probably special to him. And, wearing a skirt or not, there’s no question in your mind that strifing with Dave will inevitably lead to a humiliating defeat; you on the floor, one elegantly stockinged, furious Strider foot up your ass, that kind of thing.

You really, _really_ should’ve knocked.

But this is no time for regrets! You’ve got to speed up this slight freak out process and come to your senses before he does. You gently set down the mirror and turn to face him. He doesn’t look like he’s going to move anytime soon. His eyes are downcast, like he’s unable to look you in the face, but you can still see them. Even if it’s the absolute worst time for it, you’re glad you finally got to see his eyes. He had told you once, a long time ago over pesterchum, that he wore sunglasses all the time because his eyes were red, but you had never been completely sure if he was being serious until now. It’s a day for revelations, apparently, and you really don’t want to ruin it. If only you had some kind of clear cut directions to help you—

==> John: Choose wisely  
> Abscond  
> Abjure  
> Aggrieve

Jeez, what is up with these choices? What kind of friend do you take yourself for? You could never do any of this to your—to Dave, especially not now. Abscond? Even you can tell he’s upset! Absconding would be the move of a total jerkface, and your father raised a gentleman. Abjure? Dave has been your best friend for years, and ever since this game started you like to think you’ve become even closer, even saving each other’s lives! You can’t think of anything that would be reason enough to renounce, to abjure such a meaningful relationship. Aggrieve? This just gets worse and worse! This sure came out of left field and all, but not even the surprise could cause you to be so thoughtless or cruel as to--to harass him for it or whatever. It’s completely unthinkable!

==>…  
> Apologize  
> Accept  
> Adulate

That’s more like it. In fact, you might do all three at once because you know yourself and in just a few seconds you’re going to start babbling out of nervousness. Except maybe you’ll hold off on that last one. Um, adulate? Admire, maybe, but complimenting him out loud might be just as bad as insulting him. Dave is a chill dude normally, but with that inscrutable veneer stripped away, it’s not hard to imagine his potential for volatility. There’s no way you can expect just smooth this out with a casual “that’s not a bad look, actually.” He’d definitely think you were making fun of him or something, even though, to tell truth…seeing Dave like this is kind of, well, giving you ideas.

Ideas you definitely can’t consider deeply right now!

> John: Be awkwardly apologetic

“Um. I—wow. I—I’m really, I’m so sorry. Oh God, this is horrible. I can’t believe I just—I’m so sorry. I really should’ve knocked, I can’t believe I just, like, burst in like that. God, this is so embarrassing. I’m so stupid and I totally invaded your privacy, and oh gosh, I have never been so— Please don’t be mad. This none of my business and it’s—it’s ok if you didn’t want anyone to know and don’t wanna talk about it or whatever. You don’t have to explain yourself, it’s totally fine, I don’t even mind and I can just, like, leave now if you want I guess. But I—It’ll be okay, right? Please say it’s okay—I know you’re mad but—you’re my best friend, Dave, can you—please, say something,”

You do your best to simultaneously try and reassure your friend that on your side everything is just fine while expressing deep regret about stumbling on something he obviously was not ready to disclose to anyone. It isn't a very good best, you think, and you're literally sweating from the intensity of your chagrin. You can see in the furthest mirror that your flush has crept all the way to your neck and ears. If he doesn't react soon you don't know what you'll do. At the same time, though, you know that Dave is in far worse shape and that his iron hold on his reactions is the only thing keeping him from a complete breakdown. He's trying so hard to suppress his emotion that ironically enough, everything about him shows the strain—his jaw is clenched so obviously that you think it must be painful, and his face is paler than you've ever seen it. You can't see his hands, but you guess they're in his lap locked tight enough to crush bone.

“John,” he chokes out suddenly, causing you to take a step forward in eagerness “ _Stop looking at me._ ”

Wait, what?

He jerks his head up and your eyes meet once again, but this time…You have no name for how he stares at you, with the power of all of years of thwarted, repressed desires and internalized rage and hate, and it scares you. You don’t know how someone can live with that inside of them. And oh my God you’re ignoring him and he snarls, looking more vicious than any troll you’ve ever met.

“You fuckin heard me, John. I mean it. Close your eyes, and just _stop looking at me_ ”

You do better than that, and half turn away, squeezing your eyes shut and, even though it makes you feel stupid and more than a little vulnerable, you hide your face in your hands like a little kid counting down, playing hide-and-go-seek. When he touches you on the shoulder moments later you nearly double over with the force of your flinch.

You’re still sort of afraid he’s going to punch you or something. You should know better; you thought of it just now yourself—that all of Dave’s worst emotions are all reserved for him alone. All he does is sort of increase the pressure on your shoulder, getting you to sit. You hear the rustling of his skirt as he joins you on the floor, and manage not to flinch this time when you finally feel him settle, leaning with his back lightly against yours.

“Now we can talk,” he says, almost calmly. You slouch, your elbows on your crossed knees, the small of your back against his and you still don’t dare take your hands from your face as he begins to talk.

It doesn’t take long. He doesn’t have much to say right now, it’s not like he had a speech prepared. It’s okay. You’ve got time, and you’re both still flustered as hell. He tells you about some of his dreams and how he managed to gank all Rose’s stuff without her knowing. You listen and try not to react which you know he’d prefer, even when he tells you about how he’s afraid that that’s all it is and all he’ll ever be—some alchemiter grade copy. He talks about Bro. At one point you break your silence and ask him if he wanted a different name or maybe didn’t like being called “he” anymore. You thought it was a pretty relevant question, but he told you to shut up, or he’d never finish. Then you think he felt bad for sounding mean and he answered you anyway. He was still Dave Strider. That was who he wanted to be. The way he put it, “Dave Strider is a lot more than I ever let show. And I’m sticking with it until I figure out everything this name can be."

You interrupt him again, just quick enough to tell him that you're glad. Even though neither of you meant for this, you're glad he could bring himself to tell you stuff and that you were the one lucky enough to have the chance to hear it. He doesn't tell you to shut up that time. He goes quiet for a long minute, and sort of breathes out, "Yeah. It's okay."

When you both have been sitting in silence for a long while, his hand reaches out to yours, which had since migrated to be splayed out on the floor as you both loosened up. Your eyes are still dutifully shut and you scrunch them closed harder to keep from doing anything stupid. The simple feeling of his hand on yours makes your chest tighten the same as any spoken admission would. You really don't want to mess this up though, so you don't say anything, and as casually as you can manage, you tip your head back to rest on his shoulder. It's enough.

Enough for now that you're both still just Dave and John. Still best friends.

In the wake of such a mutually emotionally draining conversation, the moment of relaxation seems utterly perfect. But a moment is all it lasts for, because it is just as quickly destroyed by several loud knocks accompanied by the impatient, strident tones of one Jade Harley.

"It wasn't that hard of a favor, John! Why is this door locked? John, I know you're in there, let me in!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I literally spent two or three hours writing and rewriting that first long rambling sentence of John's. It was a nightmare! Mostly because I'm always on the telling side and not the being-told side, hehe. Not to mention I've never had a reaction that wasn't either "get out of my house" or "ok, cool, pass the salt." Coming out is hard! And so is reactioning well, I'd say.


	4. Out the Door

John immediately starts babbling, averting yet another prolonged freeze-up  from you.

“Oh gosh, Dave what should we do? Do you want her to know?”

Do you want _more people to know_? Did he really have to even ask, because the answer is, predictably, dear sweet Christ in a cradle, _no_ , fucking never, thanks, one surprise outing per day is bad enough. This is not going to turn into some fucked up feelings jam marathon. Jade is absolutely not allowed in the room.

“John,” you hiss insistently “go get her out of here before she breaks the fucking door down.”

You've both turned to each other with the truce of your talk interrupted. John is looking right at you, but it's not like before. In this moment of alarm, he's just seeing you, not how you're presenting. As you tell him what to do about Jade, he gets this pained look on his derp face that means he’s going to put up a fuss about it before eventually doing what you say anyway. Of course—the reason John came here in the first place; he owed her a favor. Something with the alchemiter.

“But, she asked me to make her a thing! I’ve got to do that first. It’s just a pair of glasses, a copy of mine. I’ll have to combine her codes and mine a couple of times so her lens and my frames match up, but—“

“Fine, fine, Jesus, Egbert, I’ll do it for you. Just—go hold her off before she pulls some spacey-wacey dog-tier bullshit and busts in here like you did.”

John at least has the grace to look remorseful at mention of his trespass, and that makes you feel a little better, but Jade’s irritated knocking quells it again.

“Alright, I wrote the codes down, the paper’s in my sylla—“

You don’t wait for him to fumble it out with his stupid fetch modus (although you admit it’s shown improvement) and you just sort of—reach—and snatch the paper out of a weirdly figurative tree of rectangular representations of Egbert’s possessions. You give John a short shove towards the exit as you practically flashstep over to the designix panel and punch codes in furiously.

==>John: Stall

You slip outside shutting the door behind you so quickly it’s a miracle you don’t catch your foot in it. Jade doesn’t comment on your poor show of inconspicuousness before she’s peppering you with questions.

“John, what’s taking so long? It’s been almost an hour! I knew you’d get distracted. I was really serious about this favor!”

“Um, sorry, Jade!” You laugh nervously—it’s a habit you’ve never quite been able to break, of laughing or smiling uncontrollably right before telling a lie, no matter how unfunny. “I guess I did get sidetracked. I was just hanging out with—Rose.”

You’re not sure if she got a glimpse of Dave when you slipped out, but if she did then it’s better to play it safe this way. Except pretending you were with Rose _isn’t_ the safer bet because then Jade says, “How could you have been with Rose this whole time? I stopped and talked to her and Kanaya on the way down like fifteen minutes ago.”

Crap. C’mon Egbert, says your mental Dave voice, suck up your fucking mangrit and make some shit up.

You bet if he were watching you try to distract Jade he would’ve made a huge elaborate allegory about how badly you failing at this. Like you were stalling worse than a frat boy’s subcompact in the middle of the desert on your way to Vegas with no gas stations in sight, as opposed to stalling like some kind of master god-tier prankster trying to pull a fast one to buy your best bro some time. Your inner-Dave is a little worse at these extended metaphors than real Dave. Anyway, you really are kind of fucking this up. Jade is totally suspicious. The corner of your mouth quirks up uncontrollably.

“It’s, um, complicated. Like, with timelines and everything.” You hope she buys it. She’s the witch of space, this explanation logically shouldn’t be making any more sense to her than it does to you as you say it. “And you can’t tell upstairs-Rose about how she’s also down in here right now. It’ll probably mess something up. Like a paradox. Just trust me. So. Um. You really shouldn’t come in. The glasses won’t take that long to make, I gave him the—the codes.“ You don’t do anything as dramatic as clap a hand over your mouth when you make the pronoun slip, although your fingers twitch like they want to. It doesn’t matter because just the sudden stop in your awkward flow of speech is enough for Jade to somehow cotton on.

“Aha! So you’re not with Rose after all? You almost had me, it could’ve been a time-loop thing for all I knew, but—hmm, it’s Dave, then, right? But why would you say you were with Rose in particular? It’s not just that he didn’t want anyone to know he was down here, you could’ve come up with something easier—“

Dammit, so she hadn’t seen anything when you opened the door after all. You could’ve said the room was empty, or any other less complicated lie. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You hated how good with analytical questioning she could be. You didn’t often get shows of how quickly she could form chains of logic in such an advanced manner, and it was really cool, but goddamn, this was so not the time.

“—Could it be that I’m not the only one interested in a little ecto-twin genetic malarkey?”

Your eyes grow wide. Dave is going to kill you. It hadn’t been two minutes since he made you swear you’d never tell and here you were letting this situation get completely out of hand, just letting it thrash around in its death throes, much like you would soon be.

But wait, hold the panic button just a second. Did your favorite ecto-sis just imply something or was there an excess of alcohol in your ectobiological blood surrogate the day you were materialized? Is that the reason she wanted your glasses? And you could swear you remember her mentioning wanting to cut her hair short sometime last week. You feel a bit faint. If this kind of personal crisis throws Dave, the coolest guy you know, into levels of agitation native to only the likes of Karkat, you don’t want to know how you’ll be able to keep up with your freely emotional, riflekind toting, questionably socialized sister. You vow to yourself you’ll do your best if it’s needed anyway, because that’s what friends are for. You’re not the one who has to live with this sort of thing on your mind all the time, and doing whatever you can to make it easier hardly seems like a problem in comparison. Granted, Jade doesn’t seem especially concerned about what she just said, so you could just be making baseless conjectures…It's probably best to ask.

“Uh, oh gosh, Jade, are you saying—do you mean—are you like that, too?”

She almost smirks at you and you want to slap yourself. You really need to stop giving out information like it’s slices of Dad’s day old pastries.

“Hmmm, I dunno.” She knows she has you now. “What’s he “like,” huh? You haven’t said anything. I haven’t said anything.”

You mouth twists into something pained. This definitely oversteps the explicit boundaries of the promise you made to Dave. Jade may have it mostly figured out, but her epic analytical skills are not your fault. You just don’t want to dig the hole you’re in any deeper. You’re not sure it’s possible, besides flat out letting her in at this point. She sighs, seeming to take pity on you.

“Calm down, John. This isn’t your fault; I knew already. And for the record, I’m not—exactly like Dave, no. You can tell him that later, when you think it’s right.”

“So—But how did you? You just seem to know a lot about this, I mean, about what’s happening right now” This is just like when she used to come out with those little teasers about the future or the past or things about the four of you she just shouldn’t have been able to know.

“Not all of my preternatural knowledge came from Skaia, John” She says, practically taking the words out of your head. “And I still want those glasses, even if they can’t be a super-secret anymore. You know, lately I’ve been running into this troll named Eridan in the dream bubbles and he won’t stop calling me Harry Globber! It’s just troll Harry Potter with fish puns or something. He’s so full of it! Anyway, I know you wanna go back in. You can leave the glasses in my room sometime. I really just came down to make sure everything happened like it was supposed to.”

“Like it’s supposed to?”

She just grins in response and says, “Yeah. It’s pretty complicated. Like, with timelines and everything.”

You’re not sure but you think she’s making fun of you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one took a bit longer because I rewrote the end bit where I originally had Jade as cisgendered, and I'm leaving that as ambiguous for now. We'll get to that subplot later. It's not a big deal. Now we get to focus more on the John/Dave dynamic


	5. At His Side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh god I took so long and for something so short I am so sorry OTL More is coming, and sooner too, I promise...

Once Jade leaves you with a supportive parting hug slightly ruined by its accompanying all-knowing half grin, you reenter the alchemization room. You are surprised to see Dave casually leaning against the designix, twirling a single perfect pair of square rimmed glasses between two fingers.

“That sure was fast…” You mumble, unable to hide how positively dejected you are by the sight. You had really been hoping for some extra time to find a way to break the news of Jade’s apparent omniscience where his…secret proclivities were concerned. This sure is a day for thinking on your feet! Too bad you're horrible at it. You are better with plans laid out well in advance in which only a modicum of improvisation may be required; it is your master prankster way! Or so you tell yourself.

You take the glasses from him and squint through them. Jade’s prescription is far stronger than yours and you know you’ll get a headache if you look through them any longer. These were the real thing, alright. If Dave were capable of doing anything as undignified and dorky as snort, you’re sure he would have at the crestfallen expression on your face. He doesn’t so much as roll his eyes at your unusual display of ungratefulness however, and before you can get any stalling questions in, he answers them for you.

“Of course these are the right glasses, Egderp.” He pointedly tilts his head in an invitation to survey the rest of the room. “This isn’t exactly the work of a novice alchemist.”

You frown and gesture vaguely at the warped mirrors that line the entirety of the opposite wall. The collection is practically ripped from the maze of a carnival funhouse.

“Yeah, well. Those aren’t exactly the work of a master” You quickly retort.

Dave’s blank face only seems to grow more distant. He takes back the glasses and, setting them on a panel of the machine, he approaches the largest mirror the room contains.

It is far larger and taller than even the door, your only other frame of reference for an object that huge. Its most striking feature beyond sheer size is not any distortion of shape or concavity, but its clouded surface. You step closer, following Dave to see what effect it lends your reflection.

You stand almost shoulder to shoulder with him, only hanging back half a step out of some new nervousness. In the glass your reflections appear blurred and indistinct, and it’s like viewing the room through Jade’s lenses again. The features of your faces become dark smudges and you don’t think you would be able to tell Dave’s reflection from Rose's if you had to. You don’t say that out loud, though, considering what he’s already told you of his fears of being nothing more than her flawed doppelganger. Either way, you’re almost sure that the thought is in both your minds.

The longer you stare at your changed figures—your broad, slow shape, all in shades of blue, the product of light wind and heavy hammerkind, next to his, not slender, but of a streamlined musculature, a body shaped for speed and dancing with swords—the clearer you can see the reason this mirror exists. It strips away identity, and provides a safer one in the freedom of its obfuscation.

You wonder how he made it. It is truly the work of a master alchemist—of someone who owns an intimate understanding of the essence of what they wish to create, its purpose and its meaning.

The muscles in your throat constrict and coil around what you have been able to surmise of Dave’s mental self-image in a possessive python’s grip. Your next words are going to crack and shatter your voice like the hundreds of shards of what were once unclouded, normal-shaped mirrors across the floor.

“I take it back—you are the best alchemist, it is you. But Dave, these mirrors—“ He flashes you an expressionless look that you choose to interpret as wary of your opinion, as possibly wishing you’d shut up.

Your next words come out in a rush, your voice rising comically in pitch as you knew it would. “the mirrors don’t show you half as well as I see you.”

Dave’s face positively spasms in a pained frown. You instantly regret admitting what you did. You wish you could draw your stupid words out of existence like drawing a breath big enough to suck all the air out of the room.

“Don’t compliment me,” is all he says, and you feel more lost than ever. You wish there was a way you could understand him better, a way for you to really get what it was like to—be the other guy.

You are Dave Strider, and right now, you feel more lost than ever.

You stand side at the side of your best bro in front of a mirror that should have been your favorite, considering how it gave you exactly what you wanted, exactly what you intended it to give you: an image of yourself that could never offend, that showed you only a suggestion of what you were and could be. But you found yourself uncomfortable in front of it now anyway, wishing you could just see clearly again. Maybe you're misplacing the blame too much. What's keeping you from seeing isn't something any mirror or lens ever captcha'd could act against to bring into focus, and you know it.

But fuck it, you're tired and John's still here and you've been in this room long enough. For once, you can't wait to gather up all your shit and leave, and you almost wish it could be as easy to leave this lead-heavy angst with it.

A sigh you can't help escapes you as you look at your vast piles of femme crap. Normally, no matter how badly you felt after a few hours in here, going through each piece of what you'd wrought so lovingly as you safely put it away made you feel better, but today you want no part of it.

You decide it'll be easiest to just captchalogue entire piles at once just to make it out of here faster. You walk over to what is approximately a metric fuckton of hair accessories and shove it all in your special sylladex.

"Well, I've had enough. You might as well get the glasses and go, John." You say curtly, calling him by his name for once, hoping he won't argue. You need to change back into your everyday clothes after all, and that's one show Egbert is not getting the tickets to right now. But, of course, this is John and he argues anyway, oblivious to what is obvious to you.

He walks back across the room, scooping the new frames up into his sylladex as he responds, "Um, yeah sure, Dave. I... But is it okay if I wait for you?"

Dammit, no, it's not okay, is what you want to yell at that open friendly face. It's nothing to do with him anymore, but your temper is rising. You seriously need to be out of this room now, it's starting to get to you all of a sudden, the impatience, the frustration, the interminable urge to flip off the motherfucking handle.

Still, this is little more than nothing to you, despite the day you've had. You deal with these emotions all the goddamned time, and you're able to control yourself now, not lashing out in the slightest, although you think John's picking up on it more than usual. You itch for your shades, but first you need to get out of your current outfit. Maybe this way he'll get the hint--you smoothly twist an arm to the zipper of your skirt that has shifted to rest just over the swell of your rump, and draw it all the way down without preamble. The skirt mostly stays in place, made of stiff material and held by your hand at the bottom of the zipper, but John gets it at least.

"Outside." He croaks, and you almost want to laugh. "I'll...wait outside."


	6. By Yourself

Efficiently now that John has absconded, you strip, taking a moment to clean off your face and put back on your shades and other clothing. You make sure that every bit of your other stuff is two sylladices deep in your personal inventory, but as always, you leave the mirrors where they are. Except...You pause in front of the mirror from earlier and after a moment of stifling the nonexistent urge to scrutinize any subconscious motives you might have for doing it, you captchalogue that too.

You find John floating near the ceiling outside, probably exercising windy powers to distract from his own awkwardness or something. He's such a dork. Still, you can't say that you don't like it about him.

Together you trudge your way out of the winding outer hives or respite blocks or whatever ridiculous troll name these places have. It's a likely time for someone to be cooking a meal, so you head for the communal fooding area.

==> Do the timey-wimey thing.

You step into the room the troll kids had designated something stupid like comestible chamber (actually just the dining room) resisting a sudden urge to skip ahead in time. You'd like to, but you're also hungry and you know John and Jade will be out of the kitchen with some food in minutes.

It has been a week and four days since you were last in here with John. A week and four days since you last spent more than a few minutes in his presence, actually, and you think you probably need to cut that shit out. No time skipping for you.

You might have felt bad for him for getting the cold shoulder for no good reason, but you've been busy being angry and sullen alone in your bedroom. You avoided the shit out of your usual hide-out in Sollux's old place largely by not leaving your room for three days. Your old habit of hiding food and apple juice in your closet paid off.

At first you simply weren't in the mood to go anywhere and didn't let yourself examine the reason. But when enough time had passed, the lack of time indulging yourself in your femme pursuits started to get to you and you couldn't keep from brooding over it.

Your anxiety at being caught at it had not at all lessened from one largely positive response. Instead it worsened, centered on and growing from the thought that you had never had real privacy at all. The illusion of that space as safe was broken and you didn't think you could establish another on this godforsaken space rock again. You never wanted to be walked in on a second time, and there was no way of knowing that you could prevent it.

You couldn't stop yourself from needing that time though. Needing time and space in a place where you could pretend other people and their expectations or preconceptions didn't exist. The need combined with the knowledge that you couldn't have it again, at least not in the same unconcerned way you did before John's interruption, very possibly for the entire next two years--it was pretty much the worst torment you'd ever felt.

After eight days you'd had enough. You hadn't wanted to use the room you slept in because it was too close to the others, and you weren't sure what you'd do if someone knocked on your door or tried to talk to you while you were--busy. You had to compromise something, though, and that had to be it. If anything you thought you could scare away potential intruders with an elaborate description of how intimate you were getting with some cleaning supplies or something. Trolls physically could not abscond any faster when that shit got mentioned.

You started again, cautiously, like you had the first time in the empty room with the alchemiter. Toying with colorful plastic squiddle or card suit themed hair clips and bands. Bracelets and bangles and stretchy hair ties that your hair was too short for decorated your wrists.

Even though you knew from experience that hours, even half a day, could pass before anyone ever came to try and coax you out, you played it safe and didn't wear anything that you couldn't shuck off and hide in the minute after a knock. That is, until ten days have passed.

You had been sure to be especially obnoxious to Rose when she came to ask you if you wanted dinner with everyone else yesterday in order to secure most of the day to yourself. With that handled, you decided you'd be as safe as you'd ever be to try something a little harder to get out of. So you had spent about two hours sitting cross-legged on the floor in an orange squiddle shirt and sensible grey panties, painting your nails. When those had dried, you did your face in a mirror just the size of your palm and sat for what was probably most of another hour, patiently wiping away any stray powder, liquid eyeliner, or lipstick and redoing it until it was impeccable. That done, you redressed yourself in a fitted copy of Jade's black and red 3 AM get-up. It had been one hard captcha to get, but worth it, you think, when you examine yourself in the enormous clouded mirror you brought out for the occasion. Alone in your room, eating a dinner of cheetos in Jade's dress and Rose's lipstick, this was the best you'd ever felt.

You spent as much time as you dared in front of the mirror, positive that no part of this night would come back to bite you in the ass, ever.

Predictably, as in the last instance you had hoped such, breaking your rule of sticking to things that could be removed from your person quickly and neatly did come back to screw you. First of all, you had never painted your nails before, and you had no nail polish remover. After two more days you had scratched it off as best you could and eventually decided there was no more you could do about the bits that stubbornly remained around your cuticles. With all the time it took for you to get the stupid shit off, you wouldn't be painting your nails again any time soon. However, deciding that didn't help much when you still had the remnants of your first attempt on your nails and back in the present, someone just noticed.

While reminiscing about the past week and a half you had just spent a silent minute frozen in the doorway, apparently blocking someone's way. It's Kanaya and she taps you twice on the shoulder when it's clear you weren't going to move. You sidestep quickly and tack on an ironic bow complete with much flourishing and catch her hand briefly to mime kissing its back. Karkat, sitting in the chair closest to the exit, stares at your antics and mimes gagging.

You withdraw and prepare to unleash some sick fires in retaliation when Kanaya says something that throws you the way nothing has since John burst in on you that day.

==> John: Burst in

You are currently in the kitchen with Jade gathering dishes to bring it out into the dining area. You briefly consider bursting out suddenly to give whoever is waiting a good scare, but you don't want to drop anything. You walk in normally.

Dave is in there with Karkat and Kanaya. Geez, you haven't seen Dave in like a week! You'd be kind of upset that he's sort of ignoring you, but he's also doing it to everyone else, and you figure he needs some space after he was forced to come out for the first time like that. As you walk to the end of the table unnoticed, across the room from the others, you hear Kanaya:

"Dave, are those the traces of colorful human nail lacquer around your nails? I did not know that anyone but Rose shared that pastime with me."

You glance up sharply. Dave looks rooted to the spot, unable to answer properly. You want to intervene, knowing what the trolls do not, but you just don't know what to say!

"Or maybe he's dying of some human disease that causes discoloration in the extremities," deadpans Karkat. "Is that it, Strider? Maybe it's taken your voice too, that's how much you fucking interact with the rest of us."

"I highly doubt that is the case," replies Kanaya, tactfully avoiding mention of Dave's reclusive behavior. "It does seem very similar to the lacquering I have observed from the human friendship ritual of sleepovers with Rose."

"Oh dear gog, just stop there. I don't need to hear about any disgusting rituals! This would never have happened if we could have just followed my shipping chart."

There. That's the perfect excuse. You've got this. For once, your telltale quirk of laughing as you lie is somewhat disguised, as you fake a giggle at Karkat's interpretation of human sleepovers.

"It's nothing like that Karkat! You know, concupiscent or whatever. Sleepovers are a time-honored way of strengthening the, uh, pale emotion of friendship. But Dave's _too cool_ for that, he just does it ironically with me sometimes, nail polish and gossiping about boys included, right, Dave?"

Karkat and Kanaya look back at him to see if he deigns to respond, but you noticed him absconding as soon the trolls' attention was diverted. You duck out into the hall after him, the crisis now past. You hear Karkat grumbling as the door swings shut behind you. He and Dave aren't too friendly, mostly because of the Gamzee thing.

"Couldn't he just be diseased? He's practically quarantined himself for us already."

You catch Dave in a hidden hallway off the main one, the tense lines of his face belying his loosely casual pose.

“Dave? You didn’t have to leave like that. Everyone wants you to come back, to dinner…It’ll be okay. There's no way for the trolls to know this kind of thing is gendered. You know. I bet as far as Kanaya knows, it's probably like a her-and-Rose thing, not a girl-thing."

"I'm not a girl, Egbert" Dave replies slowly, and you wince as he says it, quickly identifying your verbal misstep.

"Er, yeah. I--I didn't mean that,"

He sighs.

"I know."

"Anyway, she was probably happy, thinking maybe you'd join them. The trolls...we all want to be better friends, and we're worried about you. You don't even try to spend time with us anymore."

"What can I say. I'm a busy dude."

"Ugh, come on. Don't give me that crap. Dave, please. I get that you're upset a lot. And that you need time to either get yourself figured out or to just be alone with it, whatever. But you need time with us too, and you're not letting yourself have it. And…we need you just as much." You trail off midway through the realization that your “we” sounds a lot like “I,” something you don’t think will have escaped Dave’s notice. You glance down at your scuffed yellow shoes and when you peek back up to try and gauge his reaction, he’s gone again. Fuck his flashstep, it’s getting better every time.

“I’m bringing you leftovers after this!” You shout down the hall, certain he couldn’t have gone far. “I’ll sit outside your door and have the best ironic sleepover all by myself until you let me in, you’ll see!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, thanks for reading but I'm abandoning this story!! It's been too long and I don't have the same focus that I did when I started it. Sorry...


End file.
